Foreigners finding creative ways to make a living in Tokyo

By Beau Miller

TOKYO —

Not every foreigner in Tokyo is an English teacher — there are also bankers, headhunters and other kinds of teachers, too. Joking aside, expats are doing all manner of jobs here, pursuing passions and paving career paths that a few decades ago would not have been possible.

Here is a diverse group of four Americans, a Canadian, two Brits and a Romanian who are making a living in nontraditional ways.

Brian Tannura: The Candy Man

It all started with a talking gumball machine. Then-Nova teacher Brian Tannura, letting his entrepreneurial side get the best of him, ordered one of the devices after seeing it in an American magazine. After he spent the equivalent of two months’ salary on the machine, you can imagine Tannura’s mood after plugging it in and realizing that the hertz didn’t match up.

Gliding through this hiccup, the 34-year-old New Jersey native now manages over 2,000 so-called “flat” vending machines, selling mostly stickers. “There will be 3,000 by end of this year and over 5,000 next year if current projections hold true,” he says.

But it is Tannura’s newest venture, importing and reselling American chocolates and snacks, that has earned him the “Candy Man” moniker. “I hope to follow a path which I first traveled with the sticker business. In that business, I also began with a small testing period—one machine, followed by five and then ten, etc,” he says. “I climbed the stairs, so to speak, re-investing profits into additional machines over the course of a few years.”

Are there clear top sellers from the candy boxes he now places in offices around Tokyo?

“Chocolate is always a big hit. I learned that pretty quickly,” he says. Tannura also recalls one encounter with a customer after the machine had sold out of his favorite product. “The ‘cashew man’ took the first chance he saw to grab me by the collar and let it be known in no uncertain terms that it was I who had got him started on his daily fix, and so it was my responsibility to keep him well-supplied.”

Hazards of the job, he reckons.

brian@marketpioneerjapan.com

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